She's no virgin and there's no suicide, but it's hard not to think of The Virgin Suicides when reading this novel about a girl who disappears and the boys who long for her after she's gone. Hannah Pittard's novel, like Jeffrey Eugenides's, is set in an ordinary American smalltown neighbourhood where a group of young teens develop an unhealthy fixation on the missing 16-year-old, speaking of her in a collective voice, like a Greek chorus: "We imagined both Nora and ourselves, 10 years, 20 years from now . . . we imagined her there with us, more beautiful than our wives, more aloof, more tender, more kind." The tone is wistful, lustful, gossipy, guilty – everything that made The Virgin Suicides such a remarkable debut when it came out in 1993.

But it would be unfair to call Pittard's book derivative. Where The Virgin Suicides had a good old gothic wallow in its adolescent turmoil, The Fates Will Find Their Way is more meditative. It leaps back and forth in time, looking forward to the boys' adulthood and back again, nostalgically, as they grow up. It's a coming-of-age story in which everyone is all ages, all the time. There is a starting point, though, and it is this: Nora Lindell goes missing. She doesn't come home on Halloween night and it's not until the next day that her father realises she is gone. There's no clue as to her whereabouts, although one of the kids, Winston, swears he saw her at the bus station, getting into a beat-up Pontiac driven by a man who may or may not have had a moustache. The other boys lap up Winston's story as they hang out in each other's basements, gossiping among the dartboards, beer signs, drum kits. They imagine her possible futures, from a lonely death in the frozen woods on the night of her disappearance to the birth of twin daughters and an uneasy alliance with an old, fat Mexican called Mundo.

Nora, we're told by the unnamed boy who speaks for the gang, was "one of the quiet ones", and her absence makes her the perfect object of their fantasies. For Winston, Danny, Chuck, Stu, Trey and the rest, what they believe happened to Nora – and they have it all mapped out, right down to her most intimate conversations – may as well be the truth, because "it was too much to imagine anything else". In their immature minds, fiction and reality have equal weight, and you believe in whatever story suits you best.

Eventually, of course, reality starts to bite, and once they're adults, the group must confront some very adult truths: infidelity, miscarriage, addiction and – most tellingly – paedophilia. It's here that Pittard's book takes off. She does a beautifully delicate job of showing how the gang make the transition from a childhood morality, where every act is either justifiable or unforgivable, to a more complex process of analysis, acceptance and empathy. It's a rocky road, and the men cling to their illusions – not just about Nora but about their own lives – far longer than they should. Hardly surprising; this is a world where, as the narrator points out, a mark of adulthood is throwing your own pool party rather than asking everyone round to your parents'. And your parents are too busy guzzling cocktails at lunch and hiding copies of Hustler (well, the dads at least) to do much about it.

There is a buzz about Pittard in the US, where her short stories have appeared in literary journals such as McSweeney's, BOMB and StoryQuarterly. (It's a bit cheeky of her publishers, though, to say her fiction was "included" in 2008, Best American Short Stories, edited by Salman Rushdie. In fact the title of one of her stories was listed among 100 Honourable Mentions in the back of the book.) She's undoubtedly a writer to watch, if this thoughtful, nuanced debut about a lost girl and her lost boys is anything to go by.